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Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Neibhur, was written during the period of the Great Depression (1929-1940). In Moral Man, Reinhold insists on the necessity of politics in the struggle for social justice because of the sinfulness of human nature, that is, the egotism of individuals and groups. He fervent hopes–and that is all it can be–that a person can experience redemption, and redeem his socidety, by a Hegelian, reductionist struggle with sinfulness. Niebuhr advanced the thesis that what the individual is able to achieve singly, cannot be simply regarded as a possibility for social groups. He marked a clear distinction between the individual and the group; lowering significantly the moral capacity of the group in relation to that of the individual.
He sees the limitations of reason to solve social injustice by moral and rational means, “since reason is always the servant of interest in a social situation” (xiv-xv). This is his critique of liberal Christian theology, which strongly believes in the rational capacity of humans to make themselves be moral, and he accepts this vulnerability as our reality. In other words, Neibhur correctly saw the immorality of systems in society (e.g., social welfare) and its futile attempts to ameliorate individuals and their needs through systemic interventions.
Neibhur cautions us about embracing “herd mentalities.” According to him, individuals are morally capable of considering the interests of others and acting. That is, individuals can be unselfish. Societies, however, cannot. “In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others, therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships” (xi-xii).
My point is, some politicians may be sincere in their understanding about several issues. In fact, they may be right about some issues. But when that group gains political hegemony, it can lose focus and direction.

Dostoyevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is both a crime drama and a pedantic debate over truth. In fact, no novel—since Plato’s Republic—so fervently addresses the issue. The worthless landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered. His sons—the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha—are all at some level involved. As one critic explains, “Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoyevsky’s exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author’s most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong—all are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it “the allegory for the world’s maturity, but with children to the fore. The new translations do full justice to Dostoyevsky’s genius, especially in the use of the spoken word, ranging over every mode of human expression.

In Newsweek recently there was an article called “I Can’t Think.” It is about the fact that we are overloaded by information. “The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionalized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we make decisions,” journalist Sharon Begley writes. Begley warns us that we are overloaded with information, choices, alternatives. When we have so many choices, we are unable to make any choice at all. As a result, when we finally do respond “the ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy.”

In other words, we respond out of exigency and expediency and not out of thoughtfulness and care. We choose the quick not the right, the convenient not the just.

George Loewen of Carnegie Mellon University warns that “getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that the first 28 or 29 have virtually no meaning.” Immediacy dooms thoughtful deliberation.

Another casualty is creativity. Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault . . .” So much for making decisions in the shower or on a quiet walk. We swamp ourselves with text messages and twitter and IMs. We don’t need to reflect on a problem we can google our crisis away with 100s of hits.

Oh that it were so! No one, my friend, can put humpty together again but the Maker. Yes God. Unless we can Twitter our way to the Holy Spirit or text God we might be in trouble. We will not be able to send an SOS out on Facebook to solve our sorry lives—we need a direct, old fashioned touch of God. In the midst of so much information the thing that really matters, we discover, is WHO we know and not WHAT we know. Well, all this information is only information after all. Ah ha! Our epistemology will takes us no farther than our metaphysics.

In Newsweek recently there was an article called “I Can’t Think.” It is about the fact that we are overloaded by information. “The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionalized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we make decisions,” journalist Sharon Begley writes. Begley warns us that we are overloaded with information, choices, alternatives. When we have so many choices, we are unable to make any choice at all. As a result, when we finally do respond “the ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy.” In other words, we respond out of exigency and expediency and not out of thoughtfulness and care. We choose the quick not the right, the convenient not the just. George Loewen of Carnegie Mellon University warns that “getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that the first 28 or 29 have virtually no meaning.” Immediacy dooms thoughtful deliberation. Another casualty is creativity. Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault . . .” So much for making decisions in the shower or on a quiet walk. We swamp ourselves with text messages and twitter and IMs. We don’t need to reflect on a problem we can google our crisis away with 100s of hits. Oh that it were so! No one, my friend, can put humpty together again but the Maker. Yes God. Unless we can Twitter our way to the Holy Spirit or text God we might be in trouble. We will not be able to send an SOS out on Facebook to solve our sorry lives—we need a direct, old fashioned touch of God. In the midst of so much information the thing that really matters, we discover, is WHO we know and not WHAT we know. Well, all this information is only information after all. Ah ha! Our epistemology will takes us no farther than our metaphysics.

How can you protect yourself from having your decisions warped by excess information? Ms. Begley suggests we take our e-mails in limited fashion, like a glass of wine before bedtime. She wants us to control our access to Facebook—only twice a day.

Silly me. May I suggest an alternative? Why not turn off the computer. And pick up your Bible. And read it.

“Who knows, you may have been placed in this place for such a time as this?”

–Esther 4:14

The Book of Esther is a story of how a marginalized people overcame imminent destruction and, as a result, encouraged a whole hostile nation.

Babylonian Queen Esther=s Jewish community stands at the brink of annihilation, genocide. They are the victims of the vitriolic and uncontrolled hatred of one man, Haman, and the whimsical irresponsibility of the foolish king, Ahasuerus.

Today America is facing a crisis. While we no doubt have political and military hegemony, we have lost the high ground. That is for sure! And our world as we know it is ending. The once sacred cultural icons of this nation are forgotten, and the paltry offerings contemporary politicians and sociologists offer no longer satisfy the needs of our people. What is God speaking to us, brothers and sisters?

In the past God used Revivals to bring renewal. I think it is time we had another. Could the home school movement, even in a small way, be a forerunner of that revival?

I believe it is! For such a time as this, God has called His people, a small but significant part of which is the home schooled community, to be salt and light to a nation that has lost its flavor and lost its light.

Esther’s cousin Mordecai comes to warn Esther than she must give up her anonymity and take a stand or they will all perish. All Esther wants to do is slip back into the safety of her role. Who can blame her? But for the sake of the nation, Esther will risk everything to do what is necessary. Though her knees must be shaking, she determines to stare death in the face and stand up for her people. Which is what she does. Unless summoned by her husband, Esther faces certain death by approaching him,for one never approaches an Oriental monarch unsummoned. Especially if one is a lowly woman–even a wife.

In 2011, home schoolers, are we called to give up our anonymity and to risk everything for the promise of revival?

It is time!

The theologian writer Fred Buehner writes in his book Now and Then, “When you find something in a human face that calls out to you, not just for help but in some sense for yourself, how far do you go in answering that call, how far can you go, seeing that you have your own life to get on with . . .” You go as far as necessary. You go as far as you can. You go as far as Christ went. . .

Home schoolers, how much do you love America? Are you willing to die for them? Are you willing to put your children in a place of risk for this nation?

Perhaps we are called to this place for such a time as this . . .

Home schoolers we have come again to that sacred moment when God meets us in Jesus Christ. We are loved into becoming agents of transformation. We now need to take Him to the world. He empowers us to withstand whatever obstacles we may face.

Martin Luther wrote, “There is no greater love than God and no more desperate scoundrel than the world. . . His love is greater than the fire seen by Moses and greater even than the fire of hell.”

We stand today basking in the glow of the love of God in Jesus Christ.

My question to you is this: How much do you love God? The USA? The World? Enough to prepare your children to be world changers for Christ? To prepare them to die for the Gospel if necessary so that others may know Him?

Esther had no status, very little influence really, she had no obligations to anyone but herself. But she obeyed God and saved a nation. In Ch. 4 when she turns the corner and faces her husband unsummoned she is facing death . . . or eternal victory. In the courts, in the business world, in higher education our children are doing the same. Will we prepare them to do this?

We stand with those facing death. We stand against systems that tyrannize, abuse, demean, and destroy. We stand for life–all life, everywhere. We stand because we know that we are loved . . . That He died for our sins so that we might live, and love others too. We daily dare to search our hearts, minds, and behavior and risk new ways of thinking, speaking, living, for the sake of our suffering neighbors, sisters, brothers, mother, fathers, sons, and daughters. We will not necessarily succeed . . . but we will try. The German theologian Karl Barth urges every church to ask constantly this question, “Is it time?” Could we be God’s instrument? Is this our time? Could we be called for just such a time as this?

Finally, I end with a prayer written by the theologian, humanitarian, and writer Thomas Merton wrote this prayer shortly before his death: “If I have any choices to make, it is to lie here and perhaps to die here. But, in any case, it is not the living or the dying that matter, but speaking your name with confidence in this light, in this unvisited place. To speak your name . . . and the light you have given.”

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you (Friedrich Nietzsche). On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb argues that the “abyss is the abyss of meaninglessness. The interpreter takes precedence over the thing interpreted, and any interpretation goes. The most obvious aim of such a creed is to weaken our hold on reality, chiefly by denying that there is any reality for us to get hold of; its most probable effect, if we were to take it seriously, would be to induce feelings of despair and dread. This view invites the tyranny of the subjective—anything goes so long as it does not hurt anyone and it is believed sincerely.

Contemporary Americans are dedicated to the pleasure principle. They yearn to be considered creative and imaginative; casting off the chains of mere causal and chronological. They conceive of history as a form of fiction. Postmodernist fiction, to be sure: what one of them has called “a historiographic metafiction.”

Himmelfarb argues that contemporaries play the harlot with words like “freedom” and “liberty.” She makes a startling claim: Absolute liberty is itself a form of power—the power to destroy without having to face the consequences.

Moral Man and ImmoralSociety, by Reinhold Neibhur, was written during the period of the Great Depression. In this book, Reinhold insists on the necessity of politics in the struggle for social justice because of the sinfulness of human nature, that is, the egotism of individuals and groups. He sees the limitations of reason to solve social injustice by moral and rational means, “since reason is always the servant of interest in a social situation” (xiv-xv). This is his critique of liberal Christian theology, which strongly believes in the rational capacity of humans to make themselves be moral, and he accepts this vulnerability as our reality. In other words, Neibhur correctly saw the immorality of systems in society (e.g., social welfare) and its futile attempts to ameliorate individuals and their needs. http://people.bu.edu/

Neibhur cautions us about embracing “herd mentalities.” According to him, individuals are morally capable of considering the interests of others and acting. That is, individuals can be unselfish. Societies, however, find it virtually impossible to handle rationally the competing interests of subgroups. Societies, he argues, effectively gather up only individuals’ selfish impulses, not their capacities for unselfish consideration toward others. According to Niebuhr, this collective egoism of individuals-in-groups is overridingly powerful. “In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others, therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships” (xi-xii).

My point is, some politicians may be sincere in their understanding about several issues. In fact, they may be right about some issues. Buy when that group gains political hegemony, it can lose focus and direction.

Therefore, “All social co-operation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion” (3). “Every group, as every individual, has expansive desires which are rooted in the instinct of survival and soon extend beyond it. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power” (18). “Thus society is in a perpetual state of war.”

Individuals can be moral in purpose and in actions. But, combine a bunch of individuals into a coercive group can cause the group to become immoral. For example, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was initially a good thing for Germany. He brought jobs and prosperity to his people. However, as he gained power, the moral imperative became the despotic immoral coercion.

The answer to this apparent contradiction is, of course the Gospel Neibhur stresses the role of the Holy Spirit (what he calls the “religious imagination”). In a sense groups, political parties, remain moral because the individuals answer to a “higher power,” not to the coercion of the group or to the agenda of the group. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, was perhaps the most patriotic of Germans because he loved his God and his country enough to obey God and His Word above all persons. This was the only way, Bonhoeffer understood, that his nation could be moral and right before the God he served.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2: 3-5—“Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? We don’t need letters of recommendation to you or from you as some other people do, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone, revealing that you are a letter of Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of human hearts.” My dad’s life is written on my heart. It gives me pleasure still to read his Bible.

But, parents, write in your Bible! Even if you use squiggly lines. Your kids will thank you someday! But more important, write your lives on their hearts. That someday, perhaps one cold night, as they wait to go asleep, they will read your Bible, see your marks, and, more importantly, remember that day, long ago, when you wrote your life on their lives.

Mark Jeremiah 32.

32:1 In the tenth year that Zedekiah was ruling over Judah the Lord spoke to Jeremiah. That was the same as the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. 32:2 Now at that time, 2 the armies of the king of Babylon were besieging Jerusalem. 3 The prophet Jeremiah was confined in the courtyard of the guardhouse 4 attached to the royal palace of Judah. 32:3 For King Zedekiah 5 had confined Jeremiah there after he had reproved him for prophesying as he did. He had asked Jeremiah, “Why do you keep prophesying these things? Why do you keep saying that the Lord says, ‘I will hand this city over to the king of Babylon? I will let him capture it. 6 32:4 King Zedekiah of Judah will not escape from the Babylonians. 7 He will certainly be handed over to the king of Babylon. He must answer personally to the king of Babylon and confront him face to face. 8 32:5 Zedekiah will be carried off to Babylon and will remain there until I have fully dealt with him. 9 I, the Lord, affirm it! 10 Even if you 11 continue to fight against the Babylonians, 12 you cannot win.’”

32:6 So now, Jeremiah said, “The Lord told me, 13 32:7 ‘Hanamel, the son of your uncle Shallum, will come to you soon. He will say to you, “Buy my field at Anathoth because you are entitled 14 as my closest relative to buy it.”’ 15 32:8 Now it happened just as the Lord had said! My cousin Hanamel 16 came to me in the courtyard of the guardhouse. He said to me, ‘Buy my field which is at Anathoth in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin. Buy it for yourself since you are entitled as my closest relative to take possession of it for yourself.’ When this happened, I recognized that the Lord had indeed spoken to me. 32:9 So I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel. I weighed out seven ounces of silver and gave it to him to pay for it. 17 32:10 I signed the deed of purchase, 18 sealed it, and had some men serve as witnesses to the purchase. 19 I weighed out the silver for him on a scale. 32:11 There were two copies of the deed of purchase. One was sealed and contained the order of transfer and the conditions of purchase. 20 The other was left unsealed. 32:12 I took both copies of the deed of purchase 21 and gave them to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah. I gave them to him in the presence 22 of my cousin 23 Hanamel, the witnesses who had signed the deed of purchase, and all the Judeans who were housed in the courtyard of the guardhouse. 32:13 In the presence of all these people I instructed Baruch, 32:14 ‘The Lord God of Israel who rules over all 24 says, “Take these documents, both the sealed copy of the deed of purchase and the unsealed copy. Put them in a clay jar so that they may be preserved for a long time to come.”’ 25 32:15 For the Lord God of Israel who rules over all 26 says, “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.”’

Jeremiah, knowing full well that he was going to die in captivity, without ever enjoying his homeland again, bought property in that homeland. His investment was not for himself; it was for his children, his grandchildren, his nation. Can you do that? Can you live your life knowing that you might never enjoy your field at Anathoth? Can you invest in the lives of things and people knowing you may never live to see the fruit grow on the bushes in the fields that you bought but will not enjoy?

The British author G. K. Chesterton writes “The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.” While this author agrees that absolute objectivity has yet to be attained, it is not the same for absolute truth. In any event, the idea of objectivity as a guiding principle is too valuable to be abandoned. Without it, the pursuit of knowledge is indeed hopelessly lost. As Aristotle argues in his seminal work Nicomachean Ethics, “. . . the great majority of mankind are agreed about this; for both the multitude and persons of refinement speak of it as Happiness, and conceive ‘the good life’ or ‘doing well’ to be the same thing as ‘being happy.’ But what constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute; and the popular account of it is not the same as that given by the philosophers.” Objectivity is as allusive as happiness, but truth is real. Are people better at making observations, discoveries, and decisions if they remain neutral and impartial? Only if they pursue truth. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Alice in Wonderland falls into the rabbit hole and knows that she is lost. “Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction,” the doorknob tells Alice. She has lost all objectivity. She is in trouble. She knows it. But she still has truth—the doorknob has given her truth. Read the directions! Alice is not neutral, and in her crisis, it making observations and decisions galore. She has lost her objectivity, though. She wants to go home. The truth will lead her home. Impartiality, then, is immaterial. She has a need, a stated objective, and she can have the truth. The truth will lead her home. Objectivity is as allusive as happiness, but truth is real. Are people better at making observations, discoveries, and decisions if they remain neutral and impartial? Only if they pursue truth.

Posted in Apologetics | Comments Off on Is There Absolute Truth? (Part I)

The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man–and the dogma is the drama. [The central doctrine of Christianity is a tale of] the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. Nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this remarkable story. But the divine Dramatist has set out to convince us.

How true Dorothy Sayersâ€™ words are! I am preparing for my sermon this weekend, Romans 4, and I am struck again at how rich the â€œdramaâ€ surrounding our faith! We say in a negative way, â€œDonâ€™t make so much drama!â€ But we can never eclipse the drama we read in the Gospel.

But we try. Television has become the command center of our new epistemology. It promotes shallow thinking and has pretty well killed reading and rhetoric. The clearest way to see through a culture is to see how it speaks to itself. The television has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse. Truth is not and can never be show business. (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death). Americans want show business. This is one danger of our fascile Christian culture (Dawn, Dumbing Down).

I want to suggest something so obvious, but so radical, that it seems silly for me to say it: God is always with us: God is everywhere: God can do all things. And if I can convince you that this is true, I want to show you through the Christmas Story that this omniscient, omnipresent God loves us too.

We wonder, I fear, that it is true–that God is real. That He is here among us. I mean, we can believe in the stock market, in the Pittsburgh Steelers (although that might be stretching it a bit!), in post-Christmas sales. But . . . can we believe that God is right here, right now, in our midst, right next to you . . . I hope, even, in our hearts . . . Can we believe this?

Statisticians tell us that almost 75% of us believe in miracles and more that that believe that there is a God. But how many of us live our lives as though God knew everything that we were doing, thinking, saying? I bet if we felt this way our actions and words would probably change!

I know that the generation of which Joseph and Mary were a part no doubt wondered if there was a God at all. That is, I fear, a perennial question. As he watched his people being persecuted by enemy armies, Gideon wondered where God had gone. David, as he grieved over the death of his son Absalom, wondered if God really cared. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, sincerely held that God was no longer present or concerned about the world that He had created; that He had placed the world in the universe as a clock and backed off to let things happen according to natural law. The great Colonial Awakening preacher Jonathan Edward shared genuine concern that God was still active in his world. Or, at least, he lamented that no one seemed to act like it!

The great English Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, when his cherished wife Joy Davidman died, wished that God was not so present! Listen to Lewis–remember this is a man who loved Jesus Christ with all his heart.

. . . where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims on you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain and what do you find? . . . Silence. . . There are no lights in the window.

Are there no lights in the window? Have you given up on God?

II. REASON TO HOPE

Surely the generation in our Gospel lesson had reason to give up, to lose hope. I mean, why not? When is the last time God had done anything for them? From their perspective, the hated Romans had subjected God’s people to unthinkable indignities . . . and no end in sight. Where was God? Where was the light?

This generation, as our own, echoing the words of C.S. Lewis, “Not that I am thinking that there is no God . . . the real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.” How is God doing in your book? Do you still believe in Him?

How near is God? As near as one born as we were born, albeit in a stable among most primitive conditions. As near as one who drinks a cup of wine and announces a new Way, a new Life, a new Hope. As near as one who died a horrible death on the cross–because He loved me. And then arose from the grave . . . He is here.

He came with singing angels, dirty shepherds, glowing Wise Men. He came to Mary and Joseph–hardly older than many of the children in this place. He came. He is. He lives. Perhaps tonight, my friends, you can discover again, for yourself, God’s inescapable nearness . . . As we light our candles together, rededicate yourself to His purposes. Amen.
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This homily was preached at First Presbyterian Church, Johnstown, PA, on Christmas Eve, 1993, by James P. Stobaugh. References include: A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis; Jonathan Edwards, by Ian Murray; my title is borrowed from a sermon preached by Edward Schweitzer entitled “God’s Inescapable Nearness.”